Johnny Cash is playing from my grandmother’s bedroom. She listens to Johnny Cash a lot lately. I haven’t known her to be a huge Johnny Cash fan, but someone burned a CD for her, My Mother’s Hymn Book, and she played it every day for months. It’s not really my style, no Folsom Prison Blues or Ring of Fire here, but she liked it. She sat in her special chair by the window with her eyes closed and listened to it for days, all the way through. I struggled to understand this, seems like “We’ll Never Grow Old” would be a depressing song to listen to when you’re 86, but she finds it comforting.

Anyway,  I’m sitting in a restaurant down in Siesta Key deciding on a beer when my husband texts me.

~ Why is Johnny Cash playing from your grandmother’s bedroom?

I think about this for a moment, then text him back.

~ I forgot to ask you to feed her cats. Can you go in there and feed them? And leave Johnny Cash on, she likes him.

My  husband married into my crazy family a long time ago, so it doesn’t faze him too much that Johnny Cash is playing on the CD player in my grandmother’s bedroom, even though she died a month earlier. Her doctor admitted her to the hospital June 17 with low oxygen and a lung obliterated on the X-ray by fluid (a nurse told me later that it was impossible that she walked into a doctor’s office in that condition, but she did). Getting her to the doctor at all was what was almost impossible, not because she was so sick, but because “I can’t go tomorrow because my friends are coming over to play cards, and Wednesday I’m going to Petsmart.”

Eight days she was in the hospital, struggling with an elevated white blood cell count and continued low oxygen, hospital-induced dementia (entirely new) and a general inability to be a good patient (not new), until we made what she called “our big break.” When the hospital wanted to keep her longer to run more tests because they suspected a malignancy, we checked out so fast a nurse had to track us down at the elevator to remove her IV.  She had a gleam in her eye every time she told that story afterward, our grand escape.

I won’t bore you with the details of the next five weeks, the follow-up with her oncologist, the home health care visits and later hospice, the oxygen tubing that she called “the octopus” because it was like tentacles trying to trip her up. I will tell you that there were bad times, days where she refused pain meds, a night when she wandered out of her bedroom confused and fell. And there were beautiful moments, another grand escape with one of her granddaughters to the back deck at midnight to look at the stars, a day in her last week when we were blessed with beautiful weather and took her for a walk in her wheelchair (quite the parade we were, friends and family, two dogs plus a cat that found the whole thing rather amusing and decided to tag along). That moment turned into a typical Nanny moment when she made my husband wheel her to the bottom of the steps and bring down every plant on our front porch so she could make sure I was watering them (I was!).

A few days later, after she was gone, I lay in her hospital bed and listened to that Johnny Cash CD, trying for a glimmer of understanding. And I got it. It’s not the words, not really. It was his voice, his gruff voice, that was comforting to her. That same voice that lifted the spirits of the prisoners in San Quentin comforted me that day. So if you hear Johnny Cash playing out of my grandmother’s bedroom, it might be me in there listening. Then again, if I forgot to feed the cats, it might not.

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